Concepts

Developing for Mobile Devices

The Maps JavaScript API has been designed to load quickly and work well on
mobile devices. In particular, we have focused on development for advanced
mobile devices such as Android and iOS handsets. Mobile devices have smaller
screen sizes than typical browsers on the desktop. As well, they often have
particular behavior specific to those devices (such as "pinch-to-zoom"). If
you wish to have your application work well on mobile devices, we recommend
the following:

Set the <div> containing your map to have width
and height attributes of 100%. Be aware that some older
desktop browsers don't display well with these values, however.

You can detect iPhone and Android devices by inspecting the
navigator.userAgent property within the DOM:

This setting specifies that the map should be displayed full-screen
and should not be resizable by the user. Note that the iPhone's Safari
browser requires this <meta> tag be included within
the page's <head> element.

Localization

You can localize your Maps JavaScript API application by
changing the default language settings and by specifying a region code, which
alters the map's behavior based on a given country or territory. Read about
localizing the map.

Versioning

The Maps JavaScript API team regularly updates the API with new
features, bug fixes, and performance improvements. You can indicate which
version of the API to load within your application by specifying it in the
v parameter of the Maps JavaScript API bootstrap
request. Read more about
versioning.